A Brief Chat With a Pretty Important Person...

I just finished a short, pleasant conversation with Kelly Leonard.

He's the producer of Second City, here in Chicago. I understand him to be a very, very busy, important person. And he's pretty powerful, here in Chicago improv scene. He can flat out keep you from working at Second City and close other doors for you beyond that. He can close doors that I don't even know exist yet.

So, I was surely a little awestruck when we talked. I tried to keep it out of my voice. I tried to sound smooth and confident and friendly. I hope that's the impression that I made, at least.

He had called me because David Shepherd had contacted him about the project that we're working on together. David was writing him to ask if we could have permission to use the audio recording of an early Second City sketch called "Football comes to the University of Chicago." (In the sketch, a no-nonsense football coach tries to introduce the sport of football to the pasty, lily-livered intellectuals of the U of C campus. They don't get it and he loses his cool. Hilarity ensues.) Kelly surprised us all by saying that he actually had a videotape of the sketch, as it was performed back in 1960. A very rare find. And he was offering it up to us to use in this project if we wanted it.

I responded in the affirmative and David notified Kelly. Kelly called my cell this morning, but I missed the call. I called him back, but left a message on his voicemail (his receptionist says that he's "in a meeting" 24 hours a day, which frees him up to work at his own pace.) He returned my call and we chatted a bit.

We talked about the tape and he asked what it was for. I'd inquired about the legality of crediting them for it's use. He was super helpful there. He said that the title "courtesy of Second City" should appear in the credits. And that if we ever wanted to "SELL" the tape, we should contact him and he would help us with the legalese of that. See? Super-helpful.

We also chatted about a magazine ad that I'd found online for Rogue Magazine, showing three early members of the Second City hawking recording equipment. Turns out he'd seen it, but he thought it was pretty neat, too. He said "there are so many cabinets and bins here that nobody has every opened before. We open them from time to time and find the strangest things. I just recently stumbled onto the Stage Managers notebooks from when Bill Murray was here. Apparently, there's a lot written in there about how he was consistently late for rehearsals and how much that pissed the stage manager off."

And that's a fine example of how talking with Kelly, one gets little nuggets of Improv history dropped into one's lap and is enriched by it.


He agreed to ship the VHS to me. (I can't wait to see it.) We signed off the call cordially and he went back to doing Very Important Things and I came here and posted this. We geeked out a bit, about Improv history. And it was a pleasure to chat with him. He was as nice as he could've been with me and I really appreciate that.

It absolutely made my day.

Cheers,
Mr. B